Rupert Everett: 'Offer me a line of coke, and I’d take it’

Handsome, charismatic and with a burgeoning theatre career at 55, Rupert
Everett might just be growing old gracefully – especially after giving up
marijuana to learn his latest part

Rupert Everett: 'I’d advise you to inject the whole of your face with blood – it will make it look radiant.'
Photo: ROB GRIEG TIME OUT

By Matthew Stadlen

7:00AM BST 30 Jun 2014

Rupert Everett, still rather majestic-looking at 55 although a little faded, has lived a life of contrasts and contradictions. He is an actor and writer who has tasted success in Hollywood, fallen in and out of friendship with Madonna, and, in 2012, won plaudits for playing Oscar Wilde in Sir David Hare’s The Judas Kiss. He is, arguably, the most handsome actor of his generation, public-school educated and brought up in a military family. Today, he lives in London with his partner.

But Everett has also been a hard drug user, says he would still try a line of cocaine, and he claims that his career has suffered because of his homosexuality. He led a promiscuous life as the gay world was rocked by Aids and worried for years that he had contracted the disease. There was a time when he couldn’t look at a camera lens without fearing it would reveal the signs of the killer illness that stalked his community and friends. He is both charming and surly; passionate and withdrawn.

We meet as he emerges from a rehearsal room in a central London church. He’s tall, powerfully built and casually dressed. There is a little nest of lines at the centre of his forehead and his skin is tanned. He is preparing for the role of the bitter court composer Antonio Salieri in Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus at the Chichester Festival Theatre. It is a play about two hard-working composers, only one of whom is a genius. “God, to Salieri,” says Everett, “is inspiration, talent, passion and art, and he doesn’t have it. Mozart has the breath of God singing through him, it says at one point in the play. It’s really about this man who realises that God has not blessed him.”

Everett, who is not afraid to speak his mind, can identify with Salieri. “I can see a lot of him in me. I have periods of intense bitterness and fury at the world and blame-throwing at everybody else. It’s a very easy thing to get into.” But he is also fascinated by what he sees as the failure to appreciate Mozart for what he really is. “The court [in the play] cannot see the genius, the emotion, the godliness of the music.”

Does Everett, I wonder, feel misunderstood? “Not exactly. You can only understand the disaster of your own case yourself. You can’t ever expect the world to see everything about yourself in the way that you do – certainly in terms of conducting a career as a homosexual in showbusiness. Not so much now, maybe, because I’m older. It’s not such a threatening problem. But all through my career it was a huge issue.

“There’s a whole side of my business now which clicks its fingers for world peace and equal rights. Movie stars and directors and studios spend a lot of money promoting human rights and being charitable in Africa but, actually, in their own backyard, they really don’t accept that any of these things is happening. So people mostly said to me: 'Oh, but you’ve been so difficult and you’ve blown everything for yourself, you’ve sabotaged your own career.’ To a certain extent, it’s true, but to a certain extent, it isn’t. There’s only a certain amount of mileage you can make, as a young pretender, as a leading man, as a homosexual. There just isn’t very far you can go.”

Everett was born in Norfolk and was brought up and educated as a Catholic – “I was fed it like a foie gras goose,” he says. His father was an Army major and Rupert was taught by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth in Yorkshire. He took on the girls’ parts in school plays but he was otherwise very bored. “Once I knew I wanted to be an actor, I just wanted to get out as quickly as possible.” He left for London at 15. “That’s when everything exploded for me in general.”

He lodged with a family and studied at an A-level college but “discovered everything else”. He lived in a “very gay area” and frequented two pubs in particular. “I basically spent my life there and going to clubs.” After being dismissed from acting school, Everett was accepted at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. He got his big break as a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh in Another Country at the Greenwich Theatre. It transferred to the West End and became a film.

It was, he believes, at the age of “about three”, that Everett decided he could act. “I wanted to be an actress. I loved curtains. We had a huge pair with pulleys at my grandparents’ house. Swishing curtains inspired me first, being behind them and the audience in front.” He thought he would like being looked at, but says he actually feels very embarrassed. He never, he maintains, managed to pull off the relaxed look on Hollywood chat shows. “I was so uptight.” He spent hours in his bedroom imagining the noise of camera shutters photographing him, but the reality was different. “Whenever that happened, I felt incredibly uneasy. That’s probably partly to do with the fact that the whole beginning of my career was when Aids happened.

“Aids in the Eighties was a very, very scary thing. There were people walking around with the disease that looked like the undead. Terrifying. I spent the first six years of my career thinking that any minute now I would probably come out with it. The first 10 years of my career were conducted with this interior hysteria of terror. In one sense, it made everything unpleasant. With every lens, I was wondering if they were going in too tight on what I might be hiding. I was very lucky, considering my very sluttish behaviour, never to get HIV. But I always thought I had it. I can look at films I’ve been in and see in my face this sheer terror.”

When I ask Everett to describe the excitement of Hollywood success, he is modest. “I never was very much of one.” But he concedes, “After My Best Friend’s Wedding [with Julia Roberts], for a time I was very, very successful.” Even that, though, wasn’t satisfying. “As soon as it’s happened, you just want more. You need something else. Something’s wrong. You need to keep consolidating.”

Fame is, he says, very addictive. “You get so many things given to you and you take them for granted almost straight away. Getting into restaurants. Having people be nice to you on the bus. You think that’s how everyone is to everyone.” But his success hasn’t been consistent. “One of the great things about mine is that it’s been so cyclical, I’ve always been so up one minute and then so down. I learnt pretty quickly there was no point going on with 'successful me’ when I was being a failure. I learned how to move into 'humble me’.”

Hollywood stopped calling, but Everett has made a success both of writing – his first memoir “changed his life” and gave him a “whole new vista” – and he has also won admirers on the British stage. “I feel very lucky to have the theatre, because movies dried up for me. After my Hollywood career – from 1998 to, say, 2004 – I really hardly ever got a job.” Is he enjoying it? “I’ve never approached work with an enjoyment factor, exactly, because it’s very scary and you’re always facing failure inside your head. Although, definitely, now, I find it miraculous to be doing any form of work. So in that sense, I enjoy it more. But you do wake up in the middle of the night in a muck sweat, wondering if you’re ever going to be able to pull it off and thinking: 'Why aren’t I just on holiday?’ Everything leads towards a first night or a premiere. A whole group of people coming to judge it and another group coming to enjoy it. That’s the sword hanging over you.”

Everett is “probably quite irritating” to work with. “I’m not very fast. Josh [McGuire] and Jessie [Buckley] – his co-stars in Amadeus – are both spellbinding actors. I’m like Windows 2 compared to their agility in a rehearsal room. I’m so much more complicated and coiled. It will take me the whole rehearsal period to get to the beginning of my performance. It could be to do with baggage, but I think even when I was young it took me a long time. I was always a very complicated performer. I am a very limited actor. There’s a certain amount I can do and that’s it.”

When he’s not working or travelling, Everett is “mostly at home watching telly, doing nothing”. It’s hardly the lifestyle of the red carpet and hanging out with Madonna once ascribed to him. “I was friends with her [she reportedly stopped talking to him after comments he made about her in his memoirs] but… I was always perceived as having a very A-listy life, which I didn’t really. I did have a couple of A-listy friends, but I wasn’t on a circuit that was constantly that.”

Everett drinks “like a fish, normally” and has begun to make use of his kitchen. “Up until 50, I was out for every meal from the age of maybe 22, and never cooked.” He has, he says, stopped taking drugs, but how much, I wonder, did he used to do? “I was always very lucky. I was too vain to get into that much trouble. I had this very middle-class work ethic that held me back at the last minute from going on and on and on. Right up until I turned 50, I took, I suppose, what most people would consider a lot. But by a drug taker’s perspective, I really was quite conservative.

“I’m still probably not in the position to say 'no’. If you got out a gram of coke now and offered me a line, I’m sure I’d take one. But I wouldn’t seek one out and I know it’s not going to get me any place much. Weed, which I adore, I had to stop smoking, if only for learning Amadeus.” Did he ever take heroin? “Yes, tons.” How did he avoid addiction? “Because it made me very, very sick, always.”

Everett has long since rejected the religion of his parents, but has “great admiration” for the story of Jesus.

St Paul, he says, should be tried at the Hague. What about his road-to-Damascus moment, I counter? “The blinding flash for St Paul was the ker-ching of the cash register. He knew he was able to really make something of this person.”

Everett lost his father in 2009 but feels he still has a relationship with him. “I don’t know why or how, but I do feel with many people some kind of ongoing connection. Maybe it’s just a connection with memory.”

Beyond the fear of failure, what scares Everett these days? “Everything. Paying the bills is scary. Keeping going is scary. You can’t look forward to very much fun as an old person in 2030.” Is he still vain? “Not so much now. I want to be treated with a certain respect. That’s a vanity. I’m not vain about the way I look, particularly.” At first, he bats away my question about whether he’s had work done but later agrees to talk about it. He has his own blood injected into his face every four months.

“They put it through a Magimix, turn it into plasma and inject it back in. It’s really good for your skin. Blood is the new thing. What you really want to have, if you’re rich, is someone with your blood group running high up in the mountains all day long and sending you down their blood, deliciously oxygenated, which you can inject in various parts of your body. I’d advise you to inject the whole of your face with blood – it will make it look radiant. Then I would have a little bit of laser, which is very good for tightening.”

Rupert Everett has spent much of his life playing other people. Understanding the man himself is challenging. He is, he says, difficult. “Very. Yes. I can get sulky still.”

Broadly, he says, he enjoys his life very much. But the angst hasn’t gone away. “I still feel frustrated. I still want more than I have. But at the same time I also feel very happy to be so lucky and to have always been.”